Charles Bannerman

Stuart Cosgrove on Off The Ball has just recommended a place close to the ground called The Tulloch Institute.

In that case I wish he would just do what the other sponsors do - sponsor the club- rather than turn the operation into an eternal Soap Opera which has now extended to 50 posts, 18 of these from himself, extending across two pages and seven days.

Good Lord! I thought the Beast from the East had brought us quite enough snowflakery! Now it seems that referring to a frequent daily experience - unintelligible nuisance calls originating from the Subcontinent... or even perhaps to such calls as simply being unintelligible.... is considered to be racism. Our freedom of expression seems to have declined a very long way in a very short time since the days of "The Wheels On Your House".

Blair..... are you sure your real job isn't answering customer service calls in a tin hut in downtown Delhi? ?

Is there not an element here of wee boys going behind the bike sheds to compare willies, but with the strange twist of each secretly hoping his will be the smallest so he can find something to blame his parents for? Following a miserable 2016-17 which produced nothing more concrete than relegation and then a big struggle to make an impact in the Championship this season, Inverness Caledonian Thistle is now less than 24 hours away from a National Cup Final.... and what do we see on its fans' forum? Some people still looking for anything at all to moan about and for somebody else to blame for perceived shortcomings of governance - most recently, Cup Final ticket sales - when the focus should really be on the game itself and the chance of a potentially corner-turning cup success. Well done to Huisdean for an excellent post about 10 above this one.

Why didn't they do the sensible thing and restart the game after the rain stopped? One of the fundamental weaknesses of cricket is that, if they HAVE to stop because it rains, they don't rearrange the lost time. I mean, this is RAIN we're talking about. It tends to be fairly common on our planet so allowances should surely be made for it. The frequency with which cricket matches are decided by the randomness of simple precipitation is quite astonishing and the Vera Duckworth Method (which sounds more like a means of contraception!) appears not to be all that reliable. In test cricket they don't even have that and I believe, for instance, that England won The Ashes in ??2005??, simply because rain stopped play.

I hope the letter of requisition is watertight. In 1993 the Caley committee managed to delay a second meeting on the merger for weeks due to holes in the Rebels' letter.

Agreed OCG. I did think the SC final was marketed pretty well in 2015 and of course it carried the extra gravitas of being the SC final. It's absolutely great that the club has got to this Challenge Cup final but, to be realistic, as an occasion grabbing the public imagination, this can't match not only the SC final but also the LC final, three SC semi finals and a replay and arguably also two LC semi finals. However, I do also believe that this final MAY have the potential to have influence disproportional to the occasion, in that if ICT manage to win it, that achievement could help to kick start the overall momentum of the club after a very difficult period since last May. Yes, I agree that winning the Scottish Cup did nothing to build momentum then, but things are starting from a rather lower level on this occasion.

Now that CMIB has raised the issue, I think I'd want to add that I'm getting a bit tired of it as well. If you're going to do it, just do it. When Blair first posted on this forum some months ago, I was mildly chastised by one or two fellow posters for what was a mildly abrasive initial response on my part. Their reaction wasn't wholly unreasonable, on the original premise that Blair was just a young lad making a point about the club...... as opposed to the Slavic, Putin-supporting Oligarch which he has now revealed himself to be. Hence I now feel slightly less inhibited. (So here's hoping that Poloium-210, tabun, sarin or dodgy umbrellas aren't among Blair's merchandise! )

A Ballinluig breakfast or mixed grill for me But to return to the issue of sponsorship, why don't you just phone 01463 222880 and ask to speak to Danny MacDonald, the Chief Operating Officer?

On January 29th 2000, my media ticket got me within yards of the fluttering guttering..... and the pick of 20,000 spare Celtic pies!

Are you SURE you aren't one of Vladimir's Little Helpers?

In the first case, I see that the SFA haven't got any more efficient over the years..... and in the second, I didn't realise that Alan Savage had been sponsoring football for that long!

I see what I've done, Snorbens. I should have written "AFTER 1930" rather than "in" and from there quoted, without looking at the list again, the first two winners Citadel and Thistle as 30 and 31. The source was this www.nozdrul.plus.com/zfeweb/scotland/qcup/finals.html which, if I'd actually read the year, which I did for Clach's two wins, does in fact quote 1934 and 38 for them. It doesn't, of course, detail when in the season the final was played. You'll note that, outwith Inverness, Elgin also won the original North contest on a couple of occasions in the 1930s.

I have done a bit of Googling since my earlier post and it seems that the Q Cup was a national competition up to and including 1929 and there were in facto no Highland winners there. In 1930, it became a North and a South competition and up until the War, the North final always seems to have been a HL team versus one from the central belt like Rosyth Dockyard or Penicuick Athletic. During that pre-war decade, the North Q Cup came to Inverness four times - Citadel (1930), Thistle (1931) and Clach (1934 and 1938). I'm not sure if there was then a North v South playoff final which Citadel and perhaps Clach and Jags won as well? After the War, a new Midland Q Cup seems to have left the North one as the HL + Golspie arrangement which the current generation know and loved up until the "All In" which began in 2007. I seem to remember that for a few year after that the competition continued as some kind of non-Qualifying challenge cup.

Absolutely! I was taking "local" as Inverness but Elgin's achievement was indeed inspiring.... especially to a wee Moray boy called Steve Paterson who followed every move of that campaign from the Borough Briggs terraces. I remember attending the 25th anniversary celebration of that cup run at Borough Briggs in 1993..... ironically just before Elgin unfortunately disgraced themselves with the John Teasdale match fixing scandal, ruining what was also their centenary year.

Laurence... for a very long time before the Scottish Cup was made "all in" a few years ago, Highland League sides had to qualify for it through the Qualifying Cup. For a time this was a national competition (which, off the top of my head, I think Inverness Citadel won in the 1930s) and then became North and South, with the late four in each progressing. Though this, Inverness clubs often qualified for the Scottish Cup and frequently - especially between around 1984 and 1992 - did very well. By the way, the Arbroath v Bon Accord score in 1885 was 36-0.

The other founder members were the long defunct Citadel, Union and the Cameron Highlanders - all also Inverness teams. Thistle were the inaugural champions. I believe that a team called Ross County also started, but disappeared after a few weeks, to be re-formed in 1929. I also believe that the only club ever to have scored "nul points" is Elgin City.

There is only one thing that's worse than hubris...... misplaced hubris laced with irony.

A wise and measured response to a comment straight out of the "Pride of the Highlands" and "Always in our shadow" stable.

It's quite clear that these Protestant and Catholic communities can no more peacefully coexist in West Central Scotland than they can in Northern Ireland. Without going into historical detail, I would find it difficult to describe 60 years of Jacobite rebellions as the Reformation going "fairly smoothly". Then, after that, you have the continuing marginalisation of the Highlands by the central belt which, in football terms, left the Highlands outwith the SFL until 1994, hence adding in all the disadvantages of a very belated start.

Once again you put your finger on an unfortunate symptom of the fundamental problem - which is the Old Firm. They are of such a size and have become established/ imposed themselves on Scottish society to such an extent that they also have the media running after them - which in turn only compounds the problem. Some of the toe-curling sycophancy I've seen towards OF managers at post-match media gatherings beggars belief. It all keeps coming back to that root cause of Scotland's failure, after 500 years, to come to terms with the Reformation. This has led to the continuation of rival religious groupings which have in turn adopted two football clubs as their focal points. The resulting clout these clubs receive has made them magnets also for much of the rest of the population Aided and abetted in addition by the media and the football governing bodies giving them what they want, this leaves scant pickings for the rest of the clubs - especially in economically marginal areas like the Highlands which have been attempting to sustain two upper flight clubs in a situation loaded against that.

In fact, if you look at the attendance figures alone, last season the Old Firm accounted for 62% of the total Premiership gate while the two Highland clubs had just 4.7%. If, even adding in the lower leagues, just two clubs are accounting for such a disproportionate amount of Scottish football's turnover, then that really doesn't leave much for the rest

Regrettably, your pay-off line there is the key to the entire scenario. Celtic and "the new team from Glasgow" are hoovering up so much of Scotland's football cash that precious little is left for the rest, and Celtic's "European munificence" is really only p!ssing into the wind in return. This two club hegemony further marginalises already marginal areas like the Highlands. Hence ICT, despite considerable financial assistance over the years, has passed the limit of punching above its weight while County, despite what's very likely a much greater level of subsidy, are now also finding their Premiership future in severe jeopardy.

So what now? Re-name this thread "Dundee Derbies Next Season"?? There's actually a serious message here - if Dundee is not that far from having no teams in the Premiership, what price the inner Moray Firth? Edinburgh didn't cover itself in glory fairly recently either.